Sustainability

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James Giannantonio sur Twitter : "#Climatechange will see parts of cities under #water via @IrishTimes #sustainability. Climate change will see parts of cities under water - Robinson. Many people living along the coast of cities could find their homes under water with even a moderate sea-level change, former president Mary Robinson has warned.

The United Nations special envoy for climate change said it was predicted 200 million people could be climate displaced people by the end of the century.
Circular Economy (and Global Material and Waste Flows), Part III · Environmental Leader · Environmental Management & Sustainable Development News. Jelel Ezzine sur Twitter : "The Fall of consumer society! #TAASTI #Sustainability...
Internationalpolicydigest. In less than 200 days, the world is expected to agree upon a new climate protocol which will succeed the Kyoto protocol and govern the global climate regime post 2020.

Panarchy is a conceptual framework to account for the dual, and seemingly contradictory, characteristics of all complex systems – stability and change. It is the study of how economic growth and human development depend on ecosystems and institutions, and how they interact. It is an integrative framework, bringing together ecological, economic and social models of change and stability, to account for the complex interactions among both these different areas, and different scale levels (see Scale Levels).
The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy. Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission.

But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world. Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director.
Future Earth to get globally distributed secretariat. Future Earth will have a new secretariat with a unique and innovative structure that spans three continents.

The announcement came today from the International Council for Science, on behalf of the members of the Science and Technology Alliance for Global Sustainability (the Alliance). The preferred bidder comprises five global hubs which will function as a single entity, and are located in Canada (Montreal), France (Paris), Japan (Tokyo), Sweden (Stockholm) and the United States (Colorado). Yuan-Tseh Lee, President of the International Council for Science (ICSU) said: “Solutions to the major sustainability challenges facing humanity require integrated science and a closer relationship with policy makers and stakeholders than we have seen to date.

Resilience 2014: Limits revisited? Planetary boundaries, justice and power - STEPS. By Melissa Leach, IDS Director In 1972 Meadows et al’s Limits to Growth made scientific and policy waves, as its ‘World3’ model predicted the end of growth and prosperity as rising, consuming populations ran up against resource limits.

Green Fiji framework. THE government made a bold move on June 13 this year when it launched its green growth framework (GGF).

It was a step into the untried, untested and largely unknown in policy making. But the objectives were noble, and the intentions profound.
Constructive Complexity, or Posthuman Ethics and Value Systems. Transhumanism and the End of Religion. Moral Satisficing: Rethinking Moral Behavior as Bounded Rationality - Gigerenzer - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science. Abstract What is the nature of moral behavior?

According to the study of bounded rationality, it results not from character traits or rational deliberation alone, but from the interplay between mind and environment. In this view, moral behavior is based on pragmatic social heuristics rather than moral rules or maximization principles. These social heuristics are not good or bad per se, but solely in relation to the environments in which they are used.
Consume, Consume, Consume With The False Promise Of Happiness!
Victor Lebow an economist, retail analyst and author, wrote a very pertinent account of modern consumerism in his 1955 paper, “Price Competition in 1955,” which was published in the Spring issue of the “Journal of Retailing.”

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption.
Economic growth: how should we measure it Forum:Blog. Slowly but surely, the debate about the nature of economic growth is entering a new phase.

The emerging questions are sufficiently different from those of recent decades that one can sense a shift in the conceptual framework that will structure the discussion of economic progress – and economic policy – from now on. The first question, concerning the potential pace of future economic growth, has given rise to serious disagreement among economists. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, for example, believes that the US economy will be lucky to achieve 0.5% annual per capita growth in the medium term.

Others, perhaps most carefully Dani Rodrik, have developed a version of growth pessimism for the emerging economies.
The Challenge of Sustainable Development and the Culture of Substantive Equality. István MészÁros is author of Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads (Monthly Review Press, 2001), and Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (Monthly Review Press, 1995). This article is based on a lecture delivered at the Latin American Parliaments’ “Summit on the Social Debt and Latin American Integration,” held in Caracas, Venezuela, July 10-13, 2001.

The Evolution of Foreign Aid Research: Measuring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Donors. In 2012, 149 countries around the world received more than $125 billion of Official Development Assistance (ODA). Keeping track of those disbursements is no small feat. Measuring the effectiveness of the aid requires even greater legwork. Fortunately, data on ODA—unlike data on aid from many philanthropic organizations around the world—is systematically collected and monitored by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC). This allows researchers to not only measure aid effectiveness from DAC countries and agencies, but to also monitor improvement over time and develop best practices for improving impact.

In total, 31 DAC member countries and agencies reported on their aid disbursements in 2012.
Russian Physicists Launch Campaign To Rebuild Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower And Power The World. “Tesla was right and we are ready to prove it!” So say the two Russian physicists who have just launched an Indiegogo campaign to rebuild Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower in Fall, 2014. Tesla believed that the tower could transmit power wirelessly but this was never definitively proven in his lifetime. If he was right, and after extensive study the team are convinced he was, the project could provide an efficient, worldwide energy transmission system that would distribute all the clean energy we can use. That Tesla was a genius is undisputed even by his detractors, but more than 70 years after his death, he remains a polarizing figure.

Ethics. How Opposite Energy Policies Turned The Fukushima Disaster Into A Loss For Japan And A Win For Germany. Japan thinks of itself as famously poor in energy, but this national identity rests on a semantic confusion. Japan is indeed poor in fossil fuels—but among all major industrial countries, it’s the richest in renewable energy like sun, wind, and geothermal. For example, Japan has nine times Germany’s renewable energy resources. Yet Japan makes about nine times less of its electricity from renewables (excluding hydropower) than Germany does. That’s not because Japan has inferior engineers or weaker industries, but only because Japan’s government allows its powerful allies—regional utility monopolies—to protect their profits by blocking competitors.
Banned TED Talk: Nick Hanauer "Rich people don't create jobs". The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats - Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine.

Memo: From Nick HanauerTo: My Fellow Zillionaires You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion.

The best of capitalism is over for rich countries – and for the poor ones it will be over by 2060. The best of capitalism is over for rich countries – and for the poor ones it will be over by 2060. If nothing changes in another 30 years, the top 1...
Indigenous Guiding Principles for Creating a Sustainable and Harmonious World - The Four Worlds International Institute. Happiness as Measured by GDP: Really? - How Do You Think?
Citizens of the United States are endowed with certain unalienable rights: one of which is the right to pursue happiness.

Daily chart: Money and happiness. MaynardSmith001. Szathmary and maynard smith 95-major evo transitions. HK -= [Hacker Kulture] =- Manifest-H -= [The Cybernetic Manifesto - V. Turchin, C. Joslyn] =-
Stm. NEW09 McIntosh. Foundations. The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy and Evolution. by Brig Klyce. Institute for Global Ethics: Promoting Ethical Action in a Global Context. Saving the fragile layer that supports life on earth. Saving the fragile layer that supports life on earth. Bankrupting Nature – Launch video now online!
THE COUNT-UP TO 2052: AN OVERARCHING FRAMEWORK FOR ACTION.
After the publication of the Korean, Chinese and Japanese language editions of “2052 – A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years”, the author, Club of Rome Member Jorgen Randers, gave talks in China, Korea and Japan in June 2013.
8th of JULY: Green Growth, Innovation and Finance – Countdown to Earth Overshoot Day at European Parliament in Brussels.

On 8th of July 2014, the Club of Rome, together with its partners, GLOBE EU, Global Footprint Network and IUCN EU Representative Office will prepare for the Earth Overshoot Day in the European Parliament in Brussels with a high-level event on ‘Green Growth, Innovation and Finance’.
Smallholder farmers ‘remain left out of most R&D’
[VIENNA] Smallholder farmers must be more involved in the research process to meet farmers’ needs and maximise its development impact, a meeting has heard.
Quick start and challenges for UN’s tech transfer body. The “lightning speed” with which a UN-led initiative to transfer technologies for tackling climate change to developing nations has been set up is impressive, but remaining challenges could prevent its success, a member of its advisory board says.

Difficulties in encouraging applications for technological assistance and concern about finding enough partners to build a viable international network of expertise were two issues raised at the third advisory board meeting of the Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN) in Copenhagen, Denmark, last month (19-21 March), says Heleen de Coninck.
Indian climate experts slam latest IPCC report. Should hydropower truly be described as renewable?
Power Africa: Beyond the Grid. FUTUREWATCH: Solar Roadways. Green towns in the Asia-Pacific. Exhaustion of cheap mineral resources is terraforming Earth scientific report. Fitting e-waste into the circular economy.

Solar vs. "The Grid"
The Future of Solar Economics and Policy. Tsss: Solar Power Plant Breaks Steam Heat Record. As it plans its own future, Africa engages with the world. Payment Innovations Improve Access to Solar Energy and Clean Water for the Poor. Africa in the next 50 years. South Africa's largest solar projects delivering clean power to the grid. Development Benchmarks for African Agriculture. Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever.

The Impossibility of Growth. Climate change to boost summer flash floods, says study. Carbon Dioxide at Record High in Human History. Climate Change a More Accurate Term Than Global Warming?
The new urgency of 'thinking globally, acting locally'
Sustainable Civilization. Water & Food. Resilient communities. (Eco-onomy) Ethical Finance.